Evading the Draft - A Look Back

Thursday

Feb 27, 2014 at 12:01 AMFeb 27, 2014 at 10:23 AM

By Bob Staranowicz, Community Blogger

In today’s all volunteer military, those who serve have enlisted freely. These men and women have answered the call of their country to serve in peace, as well as in war. They were not forced into the military as were those who served in the earlier times in our country’s history.

Although “draft dodging or evasion” occurred as far back as the Civil War, it was not as open and turbulent at any time on our nation’s history than it was at the height of the Vietnam War. Protest abounded, draft cards were burned and students even lost their lives over their resistance to the War.

Protest to war and mandatory service has been a feature of all American wars, since the Civil War and through the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars. Yet during the Vietnam War, draft evasion and draft resistance reached a historic peak, nearly crippling the Selective Service System. Draft resistance acted as another restraint on the government’s ability to wage the war in Vietnam and brought the war home in a very personal way for a generation of young men. Draft resisters filed for conscientious objector status, didn’t report for induction when they were called or they attempted to claim some type of disability. Soldiers went AWOL (Absent without leave) and fled to Canada through Underground Railroad networks of antiwar supporters.The ‘Underground Railroad’ funneled draft resisters to Canada and some to Sweden; some churches in the USA, including Quaker Meetings, gave sanctuary to others. Between 1965 and 1973, more than 100,000 draft-age Americans who refused to take part in the Vietnam War made their way to Canada. Today, more than half of those who ‘dodged the draft’ remain north of the border.

As the 1960s went on, the campuses became crucibles of antiwar protest, as students came to protest an unjust war, campus bureaucracy, and a graduation that would bring them draft eligibility. Since the draft loomed over students’ futures and provided an avenue for direct resistance to war on an individual level, much student activism was concerned with the draft. By 1969, student body presidents of 253 universities wrote to the White House to say that they personally planned to refuse induction, joining the half million others who would do so during the course of the war. Selective Service Centers and campus military recruiters, like the ROTC, became targets for protest.

By the later years of the war in the early 1970s, draft resistance reached its peak. In 1972, there were more conscientious objectors than actual draftees, all major cities faced backlogs of induction-refusal legal cases, and the Selective Service later reported that 206,000 persons were reported delinquent during the entire war period. Yet draft resisters, combined with the larger antiwar movement on campuses and inside the military, was successful: there were too many people to punish or send to prison. So great were the numbers of draft resisters that in 1977, President Carter passed a general amnesty to all those who had fled abroad in defiance of the draft, allowing them to return to the United States, and out of 209,517 accused draft offenders, less than 9,000 were convicted.

Most of us, most likely, do not know an actual draft dodger but there have been many public figures who have evaded the draft and refused to serve their country.

Former Vice President, Dick Cheney received five deferments. He managed to defer the draft once in 1963 to attend his community college after crapping out at Yale. He transferred to a new school and got a second deferment the same year. Next year came number three. A year later it was time for graduate school, so that’s another deferment. He also received another deferment when married men were exempt from serving.

The next year the ban on drafting married men with no children was lifted. Amazingly, 9 months and two days later, Cheney was a dad. This gave Cheney a new exemption. And a year later he was too old to be drafted.

Jimi Hendrix was also considered to be a draft dodger. According to Hendrix himself, he was injured during a parachute jump and thus had to be relieved of active duty, which is a noble and heroic sounding reason for not being in a war. Despite Hendrix’s awesome parachute story, a biography of the man claims that army records show he was given the boot because he demonstrated homosexual tendencies.

Rush Limbaugh managed to skirt the draft at first on a deferment for school. When he dropped out and that made him draft eligible until he got out of military service for having a pilonidal cyst on his buttocks. Apparently Limbaugh denies that today and says its liberal propaganda, but sites such as snopes.com, a fact checking website disagrees with Limbaugh’s declaration.

Stepping away from Vietnam, we look at President Grover Cleveland. Long before people were dodging wars for moralistic reasons, back in Grover’s day, there was the Civil War and, for the most part, you were expected to fight in it. But Grover was a district attorney at this point and he had better things to do than fight, so he paid George Benninsky, a thirty-two year-old Polish immigrant, $150 to serve in his place as his Civil War stand in. Apparently this was quite legal at the time so it’s not so abhorrent as running off to Canada or anything, but the fact is he paid a guy to get shot so he wouldn’t get shot was not universally acceptable.

Back to Vietnam, there was musician Ted Nugent. When it came time for Nugent to serve his country, like any good evader, Nugent elected to find a way out of service. But unlike our more civil dodgers who used deferments and fake gayness, Nugent came up with not bathing and defecating in his pants for 30 straight days before he was to appear at the draft office. He literally didn’t bathe for a month and appeared at the draft office smeared in his own bodily excretions. So he got out of active duty by being shamefully disgusting.

Although there are many more who did not serve when called or evaded in other ways, there are many who served and served well. The list is by no means complete, but if you go to any Veteran of Foreign Wars organization or any other Veterans organization, you will find the true patriots who answered the call of duty.

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